No disks found on FreeBSD 8.1-STABLE on Sun X4500

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 02:38:42PM -0400, Sean Caron wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I've been contracted to try and get FreeBSD up and running on a Sun
> Fire X4500 "thumper" type system. It's been claimed as far back as
> 2007 that this system is apparently supported with no major issues:
> 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2007-May/003165.html
> 
> However in trying both FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, 8.1-STABLE (9/2010), and
> 7.3-STABLE (9/2010), I am getting the exact same failure mode as
> this fellow:
> 
> http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=14887
> 
> The system boots up, I don't see anything pertaining to disks at all
> in the boot messages, and, unsurprisingly the installer claims that
> no disks are found.
> 
> I've tried this just booting normally, hitting "6" at the boot menu
> and manually loading the mvs driver:
> 
> load mvs
> boot
> 
> Nothing works. I've tried disabling ACPI but that just causes
> FreeBSD to hang at boot.
>
> ...
> 
> Though I haven't actually verified this booting with something else
> e.g. Linux and looking at the PCI information, my understanding is
> that this system is based on the Marvell MV88SX6081 SATA controller
> which seems to be supported from looking at the source code of the
> mvs driver. The PCI ID string for this controller, 0x608111ab, is
> right there in the source. This isn't even a particularly new piece
> of hardware.
> 
> Is there anyone out there who has a Sun Fire X4500 up and running OK
> with FreeBSD? If so - what's the secret? Is there something in the
> BIOS that I need to flip? Maybe there are different revs of this
> hardware each with a different SATA controller chip?
> 
> I'm really interested in working in concert with someone in the know
> to do whatever it takes to hopefully get this resolved; if anyone
> can lend a hand please drop me a line.

My recommendation:

Boot a FreeBSD LiveFS CD[1] in verbose mode (it's one of the boot menu
items).  Once you have a shell, mount a USB flash drive, floppy drive,
or anything that you can write to and save output from the following two
commands into separate files then provide them here (links preferred;
sometimes the mailing list eats MIME attachments):

$ dmesg -a
$ pciconf -lvc

This should help in determining what might be going on.  I'm advocating
verbose boot because if there's an mvs(4) controller detected but it's
not attaching/initialising correctly, verbose mode might indicate what's
going on.  Hard to say.

If you find that there's no mvs(4) driver being attached, you can try
hitting "6" to drop to the loader prompt, enter "load mvs" like you
have been, then "boot -v" to boot verbose.  You might want to save
output from doing that too into separate files as well.

I'm also CC'ing mav@ who works on the mvs(4) driver.


[1]: Snag an appropriate 8.1-STABLE-201009 snapshot if you could,
from whatever mirror suits you best, e.g.:
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/201009/

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |